A Handful Of Mischief

In this volume of essays casting new light on aspects of Waugh's life and writings, the essential Waugh emerges as a diffident artist and a sensitive recorder not only of the Roaring Twenties but also of his century. Evelyn Waugh's undisputed talent and controversial personality are set off in a series of studies that provide new elements towards the understanding of the man and the artist: the annulment of his first marriage, his relations with the BBC are for the first time dealt with in depth and objectivity.

Relates the undercover work of George Rowe, who infiltrated the Vagos motorcycle gang, spending three years working to take down the gang from the inside.

Essays originally presented at the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference, held at Hertford College, Oxford, Sept. 24-27, 2003.

Arguing against the critical commonplace that Evelyn Waugh’s post-war fiction represents a decline in his powers as a writer, D. Marcel DeCoste offers detailed analyses of Waugh's major works from Brideshead Revisited to Unconditional Surrender. Rather than representing an ill-advised departure from his true calling as an iconoclastic satirist, DeCoste suggests, these novels form a cohesive, artful whole precisely as they explore the extent to which the writer’s and the Catholic’s vocations can coincide. For all their generic and stylistic diversity, these novels pursue a new, sustained exploration of Waugh’s art and faith both. As DeCoste shows, Waugh offers in his later works an under-remarked meditation on the dangers of a too-avid devotion to art in the context of modern secularism, forging in the second half of his career a literary achievement that both narrates and enacts a contrary, and Catholic, literary vocation.

Waugh's life and his literary life exist in fascinating, dynamic relationship. Virtually all of his fiction was autobiographical, yet he maintained that his novels were 'objects', unrelated to the life of their author. This study traces the shifting relationship of ascertainable fact and imaginative fiction throughout Waugh's career, focusing on the endless negotiation he conducted between life and art, and on why, from being author of the anarchic, hilarious Decline and Fall , he transformed himself into the author of the romantic, eschatological Brideshead Revisited .

This study of the life and works of Evelyn Waugh traces the novelist's pursuit of his vocation and his long retreat from a world which he came to regard as a spiritual dungeon. Jeffrey Heath explores the paradoxical elements in Waugh's career: his quest for a refuge itself proved to be a prison and his devotion to the Augustan graces was accompanied by a lasting attraction to a Dionysiac age without restratint. The deep cleft in Waugh's nature imbued his art with the characteristic quirky complexity which has fascinated many readers, but it left him a choleric and melancholy man who never fully accepted his calling as a writer.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosted its sixth annual South China Sea conference in July 2016. The conference provided four panels of highly respected experts from 10 countries with a first opportunity to assess the results of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea tribunal ruling and begin to measure its impact. This report contains papers by 10 of the panelists, providing a wide array of perspectives on the political, legal, military, and environmental outlook for the South China Sea in 2016.

He was a heart breaker, a mischief-maker, and that was the way he liked it. His cousins Nicholas aka Santa Claus and Jack Frost had succumbed to the power of human love but not him. He would make sure that his entertainment level was high, and he would spend Christmas in New York. When he saw a woman dressed as an elf stop one of his tricks, he was speechless when she literally called him out. Loki felt as if he was drowning in her chocolate gaze, and instead of causing mayhem for the holiday season, Loki found himself enamored by this woman who knew his true name and nature. Could a woman like her ever love someone like him, especially knowing that it was in his nature to be naughty and not nice? Vivienne Gallant aka Vivi to her friends was as energetic as her name. She always had the sight and could see through the glamour of beings that were more than human. With her knowledge and her sight when she saw Loki up to his tricks, she was determined he wouldn't ruin the holidays. But at his first kiss, she thought her body would melt, and when she showed up at his penthouse with the excuse she was guarding him, she knew she would end up in his bed. Vivi felt herself falling hard for Loki, but could she prove to him that love wasn’t a curse but a gift she was glad to share?